Man pleads guilty, is sentenced to 40 years, for killing 91-year-old woman in Northeast Baltimore home

Peter Hermann

A 46-year-old man pleaded guilty on Friday and was sentenced 40 years prison for stabbing to death a 91-year-old woman during a break-in last year in Northeast Baltimore. Police had linked the suspect's DNA to under the victim's fingernails and to a cigarette butt discarded outside her front door.

"The way we closed this case was right out of a scene from'CSI,'" city police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said after detectives arrested the suspect in September, referring to the popular television series that focuses on solving crimes through high-tech forensic techniques

The victim, Irene Logan, was found dead in her home in the 4700 block of Moravia Road on Aug. 3, 2011. Prosecutors said that in addition to being stabbed, she also had been beaten and strangled.

Relatives who had gathered to mourn Logan after her death described her as the family matriarch, survived by three children, eight grandchildren and more than a dozen great-grandchildren.

"She loved taking care of people," Irene Ushry, Logan's daughter, said then. Ushry found her on the floor of their small kitchen upon returning from work, and called police. She said an upstairs bedroom had been rummaged, and that costume jewelry had been taken.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakeis a friend of one of Logan's sons, Bill Logan, who had taught some of her relatives how to drive. Bill Logan is a community activist in Midtown-Govans who helped organize a National Night Out Against Crime event that the mayor attended two days before the slaying.

"This is devastating. It's senseless," Rawlings-Blake said last year of the killing. "My hope is that [through] the work that was done, the forensic work, we'll be able to figure out who did this very soon and bring that person to justice."

A Baltimore Sun story last year reported that Logan was born in Virginia but moved to Baltimore while she was a child, Ushry said. She was married for more than 50 years. Her husband died in 1999.

Ushry said her mother lived in West Baltimore and continued to regularly attend St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church in Park Heights until her death. "She was a very active, active woman," Ushry said. "She loved to go to church, she loved dancing. She was very friendly."